Saturday, June 20, 2015

Johnny Cash At San Quentin LP

Bought this album today at Toad Hall in Rockford. Short story to demonstrate how times have changed. In 1991 I walked into Toad Hall and asked if they had this album. They hadn't heard of it. Today, twenty-five years later I heard not one, but two bands in separate locations play a Johnny Cash song, then bought this album from the very place where they hadn't heard of it all those years ago. I was living in the Park Motel the week that Johnny Cash died. I can't remember a celebrity death before or since that stirred people upso much. In those roughly fifteen years he had gone from becoming a legend to punk rockers and country music fans to a cultural icon. Cash was the lone exception of the Outlaw Country music gang that my grandparen't allowed to be played in their home. They even banished the Eddie Rabbit song "I LOve a Rainy Night" because it contained the line "It makes me high," but somehow John denver slid through. Maybe it was the glasses. Nobody ever had the heart to tell them almost everyone in country music, even their beloved Porter Wagoner, was at the very least a pill-popping alcoholic.